Evan laughed. "It's about time for me to call on my natives. This will be our wedding night, Alicia. One of the local witch doctors will marry us, and the ceremony will be repeated when we get to Ticao. Murray and Mrs. Braymore will be kept alive until to-morrow lest you refuse to go through with the ceremony. If you hesitate, I dare say I'll be able to make up your mind for you. Too bad I'll have to kill the other two, though." He strolled over to the door. "I'll call up my natives. You'll hear the gorilla again." Derisively he opened his lips and from them issued a strange cry, that I had heard once before. It was the challenge of a bull ape to battle. And--good Heaven! _It was answered!_ There was a snarl behind him. He turned with a gasp. There on the veranda, leaping toward him, he saw, not a masquerading white man, posing as a jungle god, but a colossal gorilla in actuality, gnashing its teeth in rage, and with its huge, hairy arms outstretched. I shall remember Evan's shriek when the beast seized him, to the end of my days. Sometimes, even now, I start up at midnight with the echo of it in my ears. For one instant the two figures were outlined against the fading light of the sky. Then the ferocious fangs buried themselves in Evan's throat and the beast leaped clumsily to the ground, bearing the still-struggling body in its immensely muscled arms. We heard the sounds from the courtyard, sounds at whose meaning I do not wish to guess. And then our ears rang with the horrible, incredible, terrifying scream of a gorilla that has made a kill. CHAPTER X. AT THE PADRE'S. We passed through the night somehow. Alicia, half dead with terror, managed clumsily to release me, but weak as I was from loss of blood, we dared attempt nothing that night. In the morning the great ape was gone. I might as well say now that I believe that it was the same animal that had trailed Arthur, and which Arthur had gravely wounded some two weeks before our arrival. For three weeks it had hidden while the wound healed, and then came cautiously toward the casa again. It heard Evan's first beastlike cries, and its response was probably the queer echo I had thought I heard from the bush. It crept forward, and when Evan derisively uttered the challenge cry of the monster anthropoids, it had leaped to the attack. Limited as is the intelligence of the creatures, it would never distinguish between white men. A white man had killed its mate. It had killed a white man. With the blood lust sated, by now the shaggy brute was doubtless swinging rapidly through the treetops toward its Kongo hunting grounds. That is my explanation. I know I never saw any other sign of the huge gorilla either then or at any later time. I have told the tale on different occasions to many different people, and my surmise has always been accepted as correct.